overpass dawn
dusk and reflection
rust and reflection
mid-day guard tower
These are the smaller pieces I made at Anderson Ranch. The smallest is 3x5 and the largest is 8.5x11 and all are acrylic on paper.
And here's what they all looked like together for the final critique.
Bridge acrylic on paper 14x99 (nine 11x14 sheets)
While at the Anderson Ranch I took a class with Todd Hebert http://www.bellwethergallery.com/artistsindex_01.cfm?fid=1 . The class was geared toward making work based on past experiences, so I used my time to find a visual language for my military time overseas. We began by making a list of words that described particular memories or relationships. Since our deployment was 11 months long, I had a large bank of memories and ended up with a fairly long list. From that list I began making work. Just small sketches at first, but they got larger as the week went on. I brought no pictures with me to this workshop and instead relied on my memories of Mosul, Tall'afar, and other places we ended up to fuel the imagery. In almost all cases, there was an emphasis on place more than events or characters. Even when these "places" are populated, it's with a non-descript soldier. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe I'm just not ready for all of that yet. Who knows? Anyway, it's just the beginning for this sort of thing, so maybe all of that will get figured out as time goes on.
Three paintings that I'm working on. All oils, 25x30. In the top two I'm very conspicuously referencing Mr. Richard Diebenkorn in almost every aspect. What can I say; I'm a fan. Both of them were originally based on some digital scanner bed collages that I did earlier this year. But now they've sort of taking a life of their own and are getting farther and farther away from their beginnings. After my trip to the Midwest, I started to see the top one as a study of a landscape in aerial view. The middle one...I have no idea. I'm liking where its going but there's no reference or anything. It's just a formal study I guess. The lower painting is the result of many changes in direction. 4 or so. Underneath the top layer of paint is a snowy landscape, an abstract of a scarf midair, a figure study, a home interior scene, a flooded parking garage scene, and now this, which I guess is sort of a bar scene with 5 patrons. I may add another canvas or two to its left side to expand the space that these people are in. I'm just sort of painting and reacting, painting and reacting, and so on in all of these which is a nice change from the planning that I usually do.
These are a series of sketches from pictures of my family that I've been working in my sketchbook. The gesso is pretty nice and has a gritty quality to it. The black acrylic on the other hand has more of a plastic look. I really like how fast the acrylic and gesso dries. This allows for layers to be built up and fast corrections to be made.
3 colors oil on canvas 16x20x3
I was reminded recently of the advantage of limiting oneself when making work in order to eliminate some of the "noise" of a seemingly endless array of options. There are many ways to do this such as sticking with a particular theme or working within a strict time frame. In this painting, I decided to limit my options color-wise by using only French Ultramarine, Cadmium Red Hue, and Naples Yellow (and a white, of course).
I've used this trick before in a painting I did of a group of birds (Territory) a while back. I think the result is that the colors become unified since they all relate to one another physically. In this painting as with the other one, I used different variations of the 3 primary colors. What would be an interesting future project is to make a series of paintings that pull from only secondary or tertiary colors.
Another aspect worth considering is how color choices relate to the subject of the painting. I think the colors in the above painting when coupled with the pose of the model, give a sense of heartbreak. Maybe it's all that red. This wasn't intentional, just something that happened. But I wonder what kind of "read" one would have of the painting if the colors had been slightly different. Would the model look sick or tired or bored? I don't know. Worth thinking about though.
limited options rope, wood, steel, fabric 84 x 84
This is a very large onesie (about seven feet by seven feet) that I made in my sculpture class. Ideally it would be installed in someone's yard, but I haven't found the right place yet.
There was a ton of work that went into this piece. Creating the clothespins weren't too difficult - just a bit of cutting and sanding the wood and bending, cutting, and welding some steel. But prior to making the onesie itself, I didn't know anything about sewing. Luckily my sister lent me her Singer and some literature on how to go about setting up the machine. I think I ended up putting in about 50 hours of sewing altogether. All the fabric came from Goodwill sheets and sweaters, and the buttons are round wooden display stands from Michael's that I stained.
If I can find the time and money I'd like to make several more of these, altering the color schemes and size of the patchwork to create a "platoon" of these onesies. The American flag on the right shoulder as well as the blue/green/purple patchwork is meant to partially mimic the digital camouflage uniforms that deployed troops wear these days. The patchwork is also referencing the practice of recycling garments - something perhaps more common with lower income families. Also referencing the poor is the penny-saving practice of drying clothes on a line .
I received the first copy of the book I created of these scanner bed images titled "Outcrops" using blurb.com, but unfortunately the colors are dull and dark and not what I was hoping for. And right now I don't have the time or money to correct this. So instead of providing a link to a book that doesn't look very good, I've decided to just post the rest of the images here. Given my experience with printed reproductions of art, they'll probably look better on a computer screen than they do in print anyway. And that's alright because I'll most likely use these for some abstract paintings in the near future. So no harm, no foul.
Reclining nude with red pillow oil on canvas 18x24
My lastest effort in my figure painting class.
A small sample of some more scanner bed collages that I made for a digital printmaking class. My task was to make a book of at least 20 pages with any content I saw fit and publish it through a company called blurb.com. Since I was pleased with the scanner bed images I made before and also the process of making them, I decided to use the same process with these. The theme I chose for my book was "geology in outcrop form." Prior to making these I had gone out to the Valley and Ridge and took a ton of pictures of various outcrops of varying degrees of deformation. I noticed that what thrills me most about the outcrops was not the type of rock it was or how old it was but rather the shape, color, and texture of the beds - their formal qualities. And while these pieces don't exactly mimic any particular outcrop, I hope to the viewer they reveal some of the attributes that one might find while exploring roadside geology. In a few weeks I'll have the book, titled "Outcrops", and if it passes inspection, then I'll post a link for those who might want to purchase it. This coffe table book is 8x10 inches and will feature 20 of these collaged abstractions.
Ricky as devil oil and marker on paper 16x20
This painting is the result of watching (and thoroughly enjoying) Ricky Gervais' performance as host of the Golden Globe Awards while studying Luc Tuymans' washed out, one-shot paintings. Luc Tuymans is a contemporary painter who makes no effort to disguise his photograph or film still source material, and Ricky Gervais is a comedian who acknowledges the realm of celebrity as a rediculous, self-congratulating balloon of self-importance that should be popped every now and again. And I find that level of honesty in both cases very refreshing.
Thank you for not praying etching and drypoint on paper 9x12
A print I did for the etching portion of my printmaking materials class. It's somewhat related to an article I read about how many hotels were removing the Gideons bibles from their roooms. It's interesting to think what might happen to hotels without bibles. Would all the meth lab rats, lustful adulterers, rowdy rock stars, and slithering prostitutes and their johns no longer frequent these foresaken establishments now that the bibles are no longer there? And without all of that activity, would these places slowly wither away, soulless and forgotten? Well, maybe not, but food for thought.
This is a series of scanner bed collages (all ~11x15in) that I did one night in the digital print lab using my hands and various objects fished out of the recycle bins. Scanners have a particular way of creating an image. They don't capture everything at once like a camera but rather in a slow, sweeping scan, which allows for "repeats", "smears", and "glitches" of objects in real time (as opposed to doing that stuff in photoshop). The most enjoyable part of making prints like this is the improvisation. You can make multiple variations of one image in very little time. I think I was able to make about 50 of these prints (most of them duds) in about 2-3 hours or so, which is pretty quick. The only things you have to watch out for are fingerprints and getting blinded by the scanner head as you try to scan things in. I'm going to make a few more of these in my free time to see what new tricks I can learn. It seems there's a lot of ways to experiment with these scans.
Tension Machine steel umbrella arms, wood, rope, glass beads, toy train motor, fishing line 120x48x6
This semester I've been taking 3 studio classes, one of which is beginning sculpture. This class, like most of my classes are pretty open when it comes to assignments. For this piece we were given the idea of shelter as a starting point. The shelter I chose to work with was the umbrella. Using the graceful movement of many umbrella arms, I went about creating this automated structure. I do have a video clip that shows the movement of the piece, but I can't post it without paying Wordpress for that capability. So I may end up posting that video elsewhere. In the meantime, try to imagine this: the long, twisting assembly of the umbrella arms is attached to a rope belt of the pulley system. As the motor drives the belt around, the attached end of the assembly expands and contracts. Also, as the assembly goes round it catches itself on the red directional control arm of the toy train motor control. This causes the motor to groan and the assembly to bend. To the viewer, it looks like the assembly will snap in half or that something else might break, but at a critical moment the entire wood piece swings toward the assembly and in a thud the tension is released, allowing the motion to continue and the whole process to repeat itself over and over and over. Because the entire piece is flexible none of the pieces break.
I've shown this sculpture to several people, and there's always an audible gasp when the piece snags. What's interesting is that even though the viewer (including myself) may have seen it snag and safely release many times in a row, there's always a questioning of whether or not this time will be different. I think this might open new doors for some interesting sculptures and perhaps even in some 2D work that involve near failure. This questionable failure is present at every step of almost every endeavor, and the tension and release that comes with narrowly pulling something off that doesn't seem very likely is perhaps why we pursue anything. And the fact that a piece of art could allow someone to experience that over and over and over is a very compelling idea to me.
Musical Chairs in Hell mixed media on birch 23x32x2
Chairs2 mixed media on birch 23x32x2
These are two funky paintings that I did towards the end of last semester. They are very similar in medium and approach to the Carts diptych below. In the lower piece I was trying build up the acrylic/wood putty to make small "hills" while making patterns with the drilled holes. These wacky (and tacky?) paintings were a lot of fun to make and were a nice break from the somewhat more serious things I've been working on.
Carts mixed media on birch 49x58x2.5
This abstract piece is made of two panels, so technically it's a diptych. As the title suggests, the inspiration comes from a folding chair cart that we had in the studio one day. I really liked shape of the bars on the cart and so decided to draw it several times. After that I played with the logic of those overlapping carts to create the abstracted image. I haven't had much luck with abstraction in the past, but this seems to be the closest I have come to making an abstract image that I'm fairly happy with. I also used the acrylic/wood putty mixture that I've been having fun with lately. I don't know how archival that stuff is, but it's pretty inexpensive and fun to work with. In the next posting I'll include some other abstract pieces that use similar methods and mediums.
the last little batch of watercolors from this semester's Life Drawing class
sectional self portait3 vine charcoal on paper 22x30
sectional self portrait1 vine charcoal on paper 22x30
These are two parts of a three-piece nude self portrait done for my Life Drawing class; mid-section omitted from this post, of course. I tried to make these so that each one would serve as its own composition as opposed to being three parts of a larger whole. While making them, I tried to see the body not as a complicated 3-dimensional structure wrapped in skin, but rather as a series of shapes (and lines) reflected in a mirror and how these shapes are related to one another while taking into account their varying tones and edge states . I was also trying to avoid being a slave to the clarity of the reflection in front of me. By this, I don't mean that I was intentionally trying to draw the figure inaccurately or disproportionately, which occurred in some areas as a function of my inability to fully connect the image that I see with my eye to the picture I draw with my hand. Rather, I was trying to pull back on the finish of the drawing in order to put more emphasis on the drawing-part of the drawing and less so on the object-part of it.
Woman in a Printed Black Dress mixed media 24x49
This is a painting that was part of an assignment where we had to combine everyday objects into a piece in order to branch out a bit. The concept is similar to Robert Rauschenberg's combines. I chose to use fabric and wood putty mixed with acrylic paint. I had been looking at a lot of Diebenkorn work and was eager to make a piece that focused more on composition while giving equal attention to every mark made instead of the hierarchy of marks that occur in more traditional work (two aspects of his work I really respond to). The woman and her surroundings are completely fictional and the position, logic, and form of these elements merely stand to contribute to the composition. This process of bending the rules of traditional drawing techniques such as perspective, light source logic, and human (and chair) anatomy in order to enhance a piece as I see fit is altogether enjoyable and liberating. This is also the first of several paintings using the arylic paint/wood putty mixture (an idea I picked up from a Larry Davis demo a couple of years ago). The stuff dries pretty quickly, so it's mixed in small batches and put on in sections much like a fresco. But instead of having a smooth surface, the texture is more like stucco - all bumpy and gritty.
Note: The white background you see in the lower section of the photo is a white wall and not part of the actual painting. The fabric hangs freely below the edge of the canvas.
I've been playing with patterns lately. In this pencil drawing, I first made the pattern using a stencil and then erased/drew into it to complete the image while trying to keep the pattern somewhat intact.
